Our Birthday Present to You

A lot in a little package: Bay Weekly’s annual Green Guide

Seventeen years ago today, New Bay Times was born  and born green. Earth Day was our birthday by choice, not by chance. We were the Newspaper Committed to the Chesapeake, and sustainability was the message encrypted in our name.

With the millennium approaching, we believed sustainability would be the watchword of these new times, when it dawned that Mother Nature’s infinite resourcefulness might just, after all, not come to us without strings.

Stretch your memory back to 1993, and you’ll see we lived in very different times.

Ideas that have become commonplace in our lives, reading and viewing were new and hopeful. On the 23rd Earth Day, environmentalism was just percolating down from our minds to our lives. Even bad news  about the Bay, its health, culture and fisheries  hadn’t yet become such standard fare that we greet it with a hopeless yawn.

New Bay Time was a pioneer in telling stories of living green and protecting the water and lands of Chesapeake Country  opportunities, technologies, successes and, yes, failures. Now such stories are everywhere. But you got to know them and how they were playing out in Chesapeake Country in New Bay Times, or Bay Weekly, as we became at the turn of the millennium.

Organic gardening, green alternatives to the chemical revolution, composting, recycling, trails to take us back to nature, cars to wean us off gas, wind power to free us from the high costs of fossil fuel, green ways to build homes  you read about them, often first, in our pages.

In our pages you also joined in Bay Weekly conversations with the people who were shaping the sustainable future. Or, as we now see, trying to  for getting past the old ways into the new has proved harder than most of us imagined. Because after all these years, we’re still taking baby steps on the path of sustainability.

But the path is marked with milestones.

In preparing this year’s Earth Day/Birthday edition of Bay Weekly, I’ve walked that path again. Walked it with delight. Because instead of the bad news that’s become so familiar, I’ve seen year after year and story after story the good news of our strides into a sustainable future.

Seventeen of those stories, one for each of our years, I’ve excerpted and collected into Bay Weekly first annual Green Guide. It could have been five, six or seven times as long. As a result, some of the stories I reluctantly left in their dusty places in our archives.

In 1999, for example, I longed to introduce you to Edgewater neighbor John Taylor and his marvelous book, Chesapeake Spring, which argues the fascinating theory that Chesapeake Country has only two seasons, spring and fall.

Why, oh why, in 2000 didn’t I send you with Sharon Brewer and her daughters on a road trip to help loggerhead turtles find their way to shore and egg-laying safety? In 2001, I could have sent you dancing with cranes at Patuxent Wildlife Refuge, where endangered whooping cranes are bred in captivity for an amazing release into the wild. In 2005, you could have revisited horseshoe crabs. And in 2007, you could have traveled into the future to watch rising seas inundate Annapolis and Solomons.

The answer is that I couldn’t fit 17 years of green reading into a single issue.

For more guidance to green living, travel back in time via our online archive, which opens the doors to all these stories and more. To travel forward in time into a greener future, don’t miss a week of Bay Weekly.